CÉLINE CLANET
SECOND SKIN
Céline Clanet is the renowned photographer for the 2024 edition of our « Photography & Science » creative residency program in Toulouse.
Céline Clanet (1977), a graduate of the ENSP in Arles, is interested in remote or secret places, wild landscapes and their occupants. Since 2005 she has been working on the European Arctic (« Máze », Photolucida 2010, « Kola », Loco 2018).
Attentive to the ecological impact of human actions and to areas in the throes of change, she photographs these places where frictions play out, between the collapse of landmarks and the perpetuation of age-old values, and also explores the complex relationships we have with the animal world.
In 2023 she published Ground Noise (Actes Sud), a work on the visible and invisible worlds of the forest, which was exhibited at the Rencontres d’Arles the same year. Winner of the BnF’s « Grande commande photographique », she produced « Les Ilots Farouches », about France’s most protected natural areas in free evolution.
Her work, published and exhibited in Europe and abroad, is part of the collections of the BnF, the CNAP, the Neuflize OBC Collection, the Société Française de Photographie, the Archives Départementales de Savoie and the Portland Art Museum (USA), and has been the subject of 7 monographs.
She lives and works in Paris.
In Second Skin, Céline Clanet reveals three temporal aspects of the symbolic relationship between humans and bears:
In the caves of the Palaeolithic period, Homo Sapiens occupied the habitat of the cave bear Ursus spelaeus, going so far as to reproduce its scratches on the walls or reuse them in engravings, several thousand years after the disappearance of this animal that they had never met – thus forming a ‘ghost community’ with it.
During the Bear Festival in the Haut-Vallespir, the brown bear Ursus arctos, absent from the region, has nevertheless left a trace of its animality in the minds of the men who cover themselves in black and animal skins for a day, exposing their humanity.
At the Toulouse Museum of Natural History, the rebirth of the Caramelles bear, murdered in the mountains of the Ariège region in 2021, is taking shape under the hands of a taxidermist, in the slow, precise reconstruction of its image.
Working with prehistorians from the TRACES laboratory (Archaeological Research on Cultures, Spaces and Societies) and the Toulouse Natural History Museum, Céline Clanet explores the ancestral echo of the bear’s existence, its spectral presence among humans.
